Please help. I need to read this file and isolate column 2.

It appears the data is not separated into columns. Any way to do this?

A = importdata('Psmall.txt');

A1 = A(:,2);

[the cyclist]

Is there something wrong with doing it the way you just did? I'm pretty sure that just about any other method is going to take even more code to parse things the way you want.

[Star Strider]

Your code as you posted it runs for me without errors (in R2018a) and gives the appropriate output.

A = importdata('Psmall.txt');
A0 = A(:,1);
A1 = A(:,2);

figure
scatter(A0, A1, '+')
grid

[Charles Naegele]

It's returning a column vector with all values (i.e. 22... 3.3...) as if both columns of numbers are within one column. Thanks for trying it for me.

[the cyclist]

To be clear, when I run your code, I get an Nx2 matrix (of data type "double"). As Star Strider said, it is then easy to separate them into the column vector.

Is that what you get?

[Charles Naegele]

You were both correct, I had it right in the original code. Sorry for the confusion. Thanks for your responses!

Answer 1

[John BG]

Hi Charles Naegele

this is John BG <mailto:[e-mail] [e-mail]>

1.

You are having the same result as if you were using textscan instead of importdata

fid1=fopen('Psmall.txt');
B=textscan(fid1,'%s');
fclose(fid1)
B1=B{1}
B2=cell2mat(B1)

B2 has as single column with all data, as you mention it happens in your data acquisition.

2.

Try

A=importdata('Psmall.txt','\t')

Note that your data file has a TAB as separator, not the default ' ' (space) or comma. Despite MATLAB help for import data reads

 The default character is interpreted from the file.

It may be the case an earlier version of MATLAB doesn't really consider TAB as a column separator.

If you upgrade your MATLAB version you will solve this and possibly other compatibility issues to come.

If you find this answer useful would you please be so kind to consider marking my answer as Accepted Answer?

To any other reader, if you find this answer useful please consider clicking on the thumbs-up vote link

thanks in advance for time and attention

John BG

<mailto:[e-mail] [e-mail]>

[Charles Naegele]

Turns out I had it correct in the original code, but I thought this answer might be useful to someone else in the future. Thanks!

[John BG]

thanks